Quote

I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?

Marya Hornbacher

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Marya Hornbacher
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: April 4
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Things
Emptiness
Would
Asked
Fine
Feeling
Recite
Point
Numbness
Words
Detachment
Feelings
Ceased
Remember
Odd

More quotes by Marya Hornbacher

Image
In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can't be that bad. It's only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics? They're just gross.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
...Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
We were at another funeral party. I wasn’t sure who had died this time, but it was a suicide, and upsetting because it was completely out of season. No on killed themselves in summertime. It was rude.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
I'm a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
People take the feeling of full for granted.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
You can't teach an ear, you can't teach talent, but you can teach people who have those things not to just fly by the seat of their pants.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
And so I am feeling numb. It's a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?
Marya Hornbacher
Image
I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know that there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my own corporeality, my physical imposition on space.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless... I'm not going to have a happy ending.
Marya Hornbacher
Image
I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.
Marya Hornbacher